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Summary

Focus questions

• What is the distinction between collection management and collection development?

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of having written collection management and collection development policies?

• How should such policies be affected by the increasing availability of electronic information?

• What sections might be included in collection management and collection development policies?

• How should a library go about formulating such policies?

Collection management, collection development or both?

In the 1960s and 1970s, in many countries libraries and library collections experienced unprecedented growth. This was a time of staff expansion to cope with the growing challenge of creating larger collections. It was also the era of subject and area studies specialists: professionals appointed specifically to develop collections in their own areas. The growth of physical collections necessitated the appointment of staff with particular commitments and expertise to build and develop well-tuned collections. Today the overall level of resources going to libraries is in decline, and certainly shrinking in comparison with the overall availability of information, and one wonders whether staff expertise and skills are keeping pace with this change. As noted in the previous chapter, technology that gives readers access to information without relying on a specific collection is also changing the shape of what we do. ‘Collection development’ has been replaced by ‘collection management’ as the approved professional term, but in fact the two components continue to exist.

In some of the most widely used literature in this field there seems to be considerable confusion about the distinction between the two concepts. Thus Edward Evans, whose views are generally to be respected, has inadequately defined collection management as the activity that ‘relates to a library environment (in the traditional sense) where the emphasis is on collecting materials produced by other organizations’, as distinct from ‘information resources management’, which deals with both internally and externally produced resources. While in our view this is an incorrect definition, Evans’ gloss helps to recover some ground: ‘both terms incorporate all aspects of collection development … plus such managerial aspects as budget planning and control, staffing and physical facilities’.

Summary

The new electronic world, which is transforming not only libraries but also the organizations that they serve, makes the role of every information professional more complex; all of us now need additional knowledge and skills. New entrants to the profession simply must be up to date in this area – it is, after all, one of the few realms in which they may be able to compete successfully for a job against their more experienced colleagues. As a result, every library school now offers online and internet units which expose and train students in this area.

Several library educators have pointed out the problems involved when library school curricula are constantly added to, but nothing is taken away: over-teaching and over-assessment on the one hand, or superficiality on the other. Unfortunately, when looking for something to omit, many schools have chosen collection management. Isn't this, after all, now being superseded by the very electronic information sources being taught in its place? We beg to differ – and know that we have good company in doing so – but the fact is that many new graduates have had little or no exposure to this traditional component of information education, despite its ongoing, even growing importance. This book is for them.

It is also for two other categories of librarian: those who did indeed study collection management (or ‘acquisitions’ or ‘collection development’), but so long ago that little of what might have been taught remains; and those who know that their own knowledge desperately needs to be updated to take account of the ubiquity of electronic information sources.

It follows that we, the authors, see you, our readers, as our professional colleagues, either now or in the immediate future. We believe that the management of information resources in libraries is of increasing, not decreasing, importance in an increasingly digital world; and that librarians are well placed to provide leadership in this new century. But to do so they must see how their traditional skills of analysis, evaluation, synthesis and communication are no less relevant than they ever were.

Summary

Focus questions

• Why do most larger libraries acquire material from library suppliers rather than bookshops or publishers?

• How should a library choose and evaluate suppliers?

• What are some of the difficulties in acquiring serials?

• What are the particular difficulties associated with electronic media and licensing?

• How should a library go about processing gift and exchange material?

• How can a library acquire material that is out of print?

In the preface to this volume, we defined acquisitions as the employment of a range of methods to provide access to the information required by readers. The basic principles of acquisitions are straightforward enough: a library needs to set up procedures to obtain this information as economically and as quickly as possible. Once established, these procedures are usually executed by support staff, under only the general direction of professionals. However, the establishment and ongoing modification of these procedures, and the choices and decisions they embody, are high level professional tasks that merit consideration here.

Choice of supplier

For many years, almost all larger libraries have effectively outsourced much of the work of acquiring information resources for their collections to library supply firms, or vendors (called ‘jobbers’ in the USA). There are in fact many ways of acquiring material, and in some circumstances each one of them may be most appropriate.

Bookshops or travelling salespeople can be the most convenient, having the advantage (especially important for school and children's libraries) that you can examine a title before deciding whether to buy it – and, of course, every title you see is available, and with a known price. In addition, there are sometimes good political reasons for a library, such as a public library, to purchase at least some material locally. Against these advantages, buying from local bookshops or visiting booksellers is undoubtedly more expensive, and the range of stock is inevitably quite limited.

Online booksellers, such as Amazon.com, can be equally if not more convenient than high-street bookshops. Their databases often provide a range of ‘valueadded’ information, such as publishers’ blurbs, published reviews and even reviews contributed by customers; can be kept very up to date; and ordering is certainly easy.

Summary

Introduction

This chapter looks at the changing role of portals, and considers what function they may serve in the future.

It is common for new technologies to be understood by relating them to older, more familiar technologies. Two consequences of this tendency are discussed: problems associated with the new technology's adoption might be ignored, and opportunities that are afforded by it are sometimes overlooked.

In the case of the internet, comparisons with print and broadcast media often ignore the fact that such means of information exchange are subject to a greater degree of quality control than the internet. They are also, however, far more constrained and less accessible than the internet.

Portals, it is argued, can help to compensate for the loss of some of the quality control mechanisms associated with other media, while allowing a level of discussion and exchange that would not previously have been possible.

A change of role

In July 1999, the retail outlet Dixons floated 20% of its Internet Service Provider, Freeserve (DSG International, 2005). The Dot Com bubble was inflating nicely at the time; Freeserve (now Wanadoo) had over a million subscribers, and there was considerable interest in the flotation (Fleming,1999).

In the preceding year, it had become conventional wisdom

that ‘portals’ would be the means whereby corporations would capture the hearts and minds of consumers …. They were therefore expected by this particular round of soothsayers to command high advertising-rates and click-through fees, plus commissions on resulting sales.

(Clarke, 1999)

The Freeserve flotation was part of what Tim Berners-Lee (1999) refers to as ‘the battle of the portals’. At the time, I remember hearing an interview with a financial pundit who expressed the view that the shares would be a good investment. Freeserve, he explained, provided a way into the internet for over a million users, and with such a large potential audience, advertisers would be as interested in Freeserve as they would in a television channel.

As McLuhan (1964) observed, a common way of coming to terms with a new technology is to relate it to an existing one:

people feel compelled to look at new situations as if they were old ones (33).

Summary

Introduction

One prominent aspect of globalization is the voluminous flow of information. Many organizations today deploy internet and mobile devices as they believe that their workforce needs to be empowered with multiple tools to work and access information to be efficient and effective. Partly as a consequence it has become increasingly difficult to navigate the resulting rich information environment and find the right information.

A solution that has emerged in the last decade is the corporate portal or businessto- employee (B2E) portal. B2E portals represent a customized, personalized, constantly changing mix of news, resources, applications and e-commerce options intended to be the desktop destination for everyone in the organization and a primary vehicle through which people do their work (Ransdell, 2000). Accessed from the desktop, or using notebooks or even personal digital assistants (PDAs), such portals link employees to a range of internal and external information and connect them with other employees. The portal provides not only general corporate information for employees, but also some applications aimed at assisting employees with workrelated and specific tasks, such as managing benefits, insurance and payroll cheque. The portals also provide employees with the personal information they need in the form of web links such as to stocks and shares information, weather forecasts, travel sites or even shopping services. Using B2E portals, employees can manage their work as well as personal matters without the intervention of other administrative staff.

Plumtree Software (2002a) has identified the main drivers for B2E portals (see Figure 10.1). The promised benefits include (Forrester Research, 2001):

Summary

Introduction

At the height of the dot.com bubble, portal technology was hailed as the transformational force that would change higher education institutions (HEIs) forever. In streamlining business information processes and offering members of the university a one-stop-shop experience, it was claimed that the institutional portal would act as the catalyst catapulting institutions into the new millennium. Consequently, universities worldwide have started to form collaborations and networks to explore and develop this technology and specifically plan to make it a key institutional platform.

The research reported in this chapter investigates the implementation of portal systems in UK HEIs between December 2003 and June 2004. It covers 45 universities and two university sector colleges in the UK for a comprehensive representation of the sector. It establishes a practical and realistic overview of the real progress of portal development and integration at British universities. How far has the much promised seamless integration of different software into one big network with a single sign-on facility been accomplished? What kind of problems or obstacles and also advantages have been identified? What does the pattern of past progress suggest about how future development will proceed?

Methodology

Methodologically, the research draws on previous work in the area of portal development and integration in large organizations and on organizational theory (Katz, 2002; Strauss, 2002), as well as of principles and types of information portals and managed learning environments in general (Britain and Liber, 1999; Davydov, 2001; JISC, 2001) and in specialized portal solutions specifically (Cox and Yeates, 2002).

Empirical research for this study involved the evaluation and analysis of the development of institution-wide portal systems, acting as an umbrella structure for the underlying information system configuration of the university. The research addresses a debate over the stage of portal integration in higher education and the progress they have made, using ethnographic observation strategies, as well as semistructured and unstructured interview techniques. The research also took a comparative approach, involving the systematic comparison of different university systems to understand their similarities and differences and how they interrelate to each other and are integrated in a portal environment. The research draws also on a historical approach to understand the context within which the portal concept has emerged and how it is pursued today.

Summary

Introduction

All portals seek to integrate information access within a single framework, but different types of portals focus on different information resources, different types of services or different groups of users with varying needs and areas of interest. Within any one organization, there may be a need for several portal-type applications in order to address the full range of user needs. Even an organization that has successfully implemented a corporate or enterprise information portal providing broad, horizontal services to a wide range of corporate, financial, personnel, customer and administrative information may still require ‘a specialized applicationspecific vertical portal’ (Gourley, 2003) to provide richer and more focused services in the areas of bibliographic and library information. These specific and specialized needs are those that the library portal seeks to address.

Various formal definitions of a library portal have been put forward by different groups (Library of Congress, 2003; European Library Automation Group, 2002; ARL Scholars’ Portal Working Group, 2001; Cox and Yeates, 2003, in a report for JISC). Ignoring differences in perspective and emphasis, these different definitions can be summarized as follows:

A library portal is a web-based service that allows end users to discover relevant information resources, use a common interface to search one or more resources simultaneously, and then make use of the content of those resources as directly as possible. It offers customization, personalization and authentication services to make the end user's experience as simple and effective as possible.

Services offered by a library portal

In functional terms a library portal can be expected to provide all of the following services.

Resource discovery

A library portal helps users to discover resources such as electronic catalogues, citation databases, abstracting and indexing services, collections of journal articles or other digital collections that are relevant to their needs and interests. Specifically, users may browse lists of these information resources in alphabetical order or categorized by topic; they may also search metadata descriptions by title, subject or keyword, retrieving only the resources that are likely to be most useful to them.

Summary

In previous chapters we have looked at some of the different kinds of structure to be found in the thesaurus and related subject tools, and the purposes to which the thesaurus can be put. Other aspects of the thesaurus include the scope and range of the vocabulary, and the sort of material to which it is intended to be applied.

General and special thesauri

General thesauri: UNESCO and BSI Root

The thesaurus is unlike the bibliographic classification scheme, and more like contemporary taxonomic tools, in that it is more usually designed for a specific and limited subject field. Whereas several large general classification schemes and subject heading lists exist, there are no completely general thesauri. However, there are a few that cover a wide range of subjects. The two best known of those that are available are the UNESCO Thesaurus and the British Standard Institution's Root Thesaurus.

Although they are widely regarded as being general in scope, in reality neither deals with the whole of human knowledge in the way that, for example, the Dewey Decimal Classification does. The University of London Computing Centre hosts a browsable version of the UNESCO Thesaurus at www.ulcc.ac.uk/unesco/, of which it states:

The UNESCO Thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary developed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation which includes subject terms for the following areas of knowledge: education, science, culture, social and human sciences, information and communication, and politics, law and economics. It also includes the names of countries and groupings of countries: political, economic, geographic, ethnic and religious, and linguistic groupings.

This clearly relates to the economic, social, and cultural subjects which are UNESCO's remit. Although the thesaurus does contain some vocabulary for the sciences, this is largely related to economic and social aspects of those subjects, and there is no detailed terminology for, say, technology or the pure sciences.

The BSI Root Thesaurus was developed for BSI's in-house indexing of its own standards, and its descriptors are now entered into the BSI database available for online searching for British Standards. The scope of the thesaurus is potentially very broad, but, in practical terms, has something of a bias towards the scientific and technical since those are the subjects in which standards predominate.

Summary

Digital research tools in higher education

Institutions of higher education traditionally occupy themselves with teaching an established corpus of wisdom to the next generation, and in the process of doing so produce and manage vast quantities of information. They have benefited immeasurably from information and communication technology (ICT), which allows them to manage their enormous resources better, while their administration and teaching have been transformed by new digital tools. However, some faculties have taken advantage of the revolution more than others. For universities research is big business. Those who can stay ahead of the innovation curve stand to benefit immensely. The fields of science and engineering stand out, both competing with and collaborating with commercial and governmental research and development projects for the latest applications of information and computer technology. Their research culture is attuned to collaborative working and large sets of raw data. The internet and the world wide web are themselves the product of disciplinary needs within these sectors, and many of the rapidly developing e-science or grid computing programmes have been under way in the science and engineering field for over a decade.

Portal technology quickly became a useful strategy for managing the vast array of information becoming available through the internet on the world wide web. As a tool something akin to the Swiss army knife, portals offered to do many things for the user, but with none of them dedicated to a single task. The work of portals has evolved from what might be termed ‘thin’ portals (also called gateways or hubs), which contain pages of links or web-searching tools, to ‘thick’ portals, which rely on grid technologies to aggregate many forms of data into a single, personalized interface, facilitating communication and collaboration by using high speed data transfers and alerting services. Portal technologies sit atop the complex network architecture supplied by grid computing and web services, and provide a simple entry-point into a range of networked computational tools. This convergence of portals and grid computing is beginning to shape various new initiatives throughout the higher education sector known as ‘e-research’.

Summary

Introduction

Community portals use technology as a presentation medium for community and civic networking. Although the intrinsic properties and functionality of such portals are similar, the generic term ‘community portal’ as it has evolved over the past decade encompasses two quite distinct types of activity:

Summary

Purpose

The meaning of the word ‘portal’ is elusive, fuzzy, but people persist in using it. It captures something people want to say. It is a valuable property that can sell software, websites and projects. At some level it expresses what users and organizations are looking for.

The purpose of this book is to draw together authors from multiple perspectives to explore themes and sectoral experiences as a way of increasing our general understanding of how the concept of the portal is being realized in different contexts. Many previous books have focused on the latest technology. Others have tended to concentrate on web, corporate or academic portals – ignoring the potential and reality for cross-sector learning. This book tries to bring many different views together, both to capture directly lessons and wisdom about portals and to stimulate the reader to think about what cross-linkages can be made. The primary focus is the efforts of organizations to create portals for their own members, rather than general web portals, but their relevance as models is recognized in most chapters. The chapters are probably more suggestive and stimulating than conclusive. I hope the reader will feel they have learnt a lot from reading the book, but they will probably not have found simple or easy answers.

In the first section of the book authors tackle broad themes such as technologies, personalization, usability and management issues. Even if one questions the value of the term ‘portal’, it is clear that these are now key issues in information service management. The second section focuses more specifically on the role of information professionals and libraries in portals. In the third and fourth sections, authors explore the experience of portals in different sectors, sometimes capturing a particular institution's experience, sometimes reflecting on whole industries. The three chapters in the final section deal specifically with an issue that is present throughout the book: the future of portals.

Each author speaks in their own voice, with the section introductions setting some context, adding some points that have not been covered by the chapter authors and suggesting a few of the many connections and contrasts that can be made between chapters.

Summary

Introduction

The discussion of portals throughout this book has revolved around the delivery of portal functionality through the world wide web. Portals have rarely been discussed in the context of client software that needs to be installed and run from the desktop. Certainly individual areas of functionality that are associated with portals – searching, news, information gathering – do have many desktop tools associated with them, but when it comes to drawing them together the web has been the platform of choice.

Bearing this in mind it is sometimes hard to believe that the web has been around for little over a decade in the form that we know and love. In that time there has been enormous change and the pace of this change shows no signs of stopping. From an innovation viewpoint this promises to deliver ever more powerful and flexible services: from a user's viewpoint this advance may be tempered by a concern that what is available today will simply be superseded tomorrow, requiring constant adjustment to the web landscape.

In a presentation entitled ‘The Open Source Paradigm Shift’, and later in a paper with the same title published on his website, Tim O'Reilly picked out a number of changes and developments in the field of open-source software development that had taken place in recent years, and identified some key trends. These were:

Summary

Utrecht University and the beginning of MyUU

Utrecht University was established in 1636. Utrecht is the largest research university in the Netherlands and ranks fourth in Europe in research. There are more than 8000 staff and the University enrolls the largest number of students in the country, about 28,000 in all. Annual turnover amounts to €630 million.

University administration has been decentralized for more than 20 years, with considerable powers for faculty boards and support organizations while central administration is organized along the lines of a holding company. The University Board has been recentralizing for some years now because of budgetary pressures and the need for a more business-like approach to university policies.

Utrecht University is unique in Europe in having outsourced its central IT organization to a commercial IT provider, Capgemini. The reasons for this move in 1999 were complex. The central IT department had been competing poorly with faculty computing centres and a move towards offering IT services to outside organizations failed. The central IT organization was also seen as demand driven, rather than customer oriented. The outsourcing process was guided by the establishment of a new but small strategic IT department at central office with a chief information officer (CIO) reporting directly to the University Board. The CIO drew up the first five-year strategic IT plan of the University, which was adopted by the University decision makers, Board, Deans and Council, in 2000. In the plan customer web services were given strategic priority and a university-wide intranet with the name MyUU was announced. This intranet would come into being by portal technology. At the time portal software was still in its infancy, but the University Board and the CIO had seen a rudimentary portal developed by Capgemini, called MyGalaxy, and it was thought that this could provide the link between the individual applications of the departments and be of strategic value in the battle for students in Holland. Moreover, portal technology promised to offer a contribution to a closer interaction of faculties and central office through a common intranet. Although the strategic plan met with wide approval, it was not declared binding for faculty and central departments, but considered a roadmap for the strategic central IT department. This lack of strong governance was not specific to IT, but generic to Utrecht University in most administrative matters.

Summary

The next stage in managing the controlled vocabulary is to introduce some internal structure into each facet. Among other things, it's necessary to identify synonyms and near synonyms in the vocabulary, and to establish relationships of hierarchy. It's therefore useful to take a more detailed look at the thesaural relationships and how they are used to express these in the alphabetical display.

The principal thesaural relationships

The form of cross-referencing in thesauri is now formalized in a standard manner, and the great majority of thesauri use five abbreviated codes to indicate the different kinds of relationship between an entry term and other terms in the vocabulary. These are:

USE a reference from a non-preferred term to a preferred term

UF Use For: a reference from a preferred term to a non-preferred term

BT broader term: a reference to terms which are more general in scope

NT narrower term: a reference to terms which are more specific in scope

RT related term: a reference to a term which is related in some way other than BT or NT

Other codes

In addition, the code SN (scope note) is used when it is necessary to explain or define a term or otherwise indicate how and where it should be used. The word ‘scope’ is used in the sense of the range of meaning of the term, and any limitations on that meaning. Scope notes can take the form of definitions, explanations, or instructions on the application of a term. They may also include examples of how a term should be used.

There are other examples of codes besides those used to express interterm relationships. Both the new British Standard and the American Standard include HN (history note) for information about when terms were added or amended and other editorial details of that kind. Some thesauri employ a formal code for notations, such as CC (classification code). The British Standard also includes DEF (definition) for thesauri which explicitly distinguish these from other aspects of the scope note.

Top term

The relationship TT (or top term) may be encountered in a multidisciplinary thesaurus, indicating the general subject area in which a term occurs.

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About the authors

2 - Collection management and collection development policies

Summary

Preface

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7 - Acquisitions processes and procedures

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Content

Index

Acknowledgements

2 - Portals or filters? Identifying quality on the internet

Summary

10 - Information at your fingertips: B2E portal as a strategic tool for today's workforce

Summary

13 - Portal implementation in UK higher education institutions: a comparative analysis

Summary

9 - Library portals

Summary

17 - Building a thesaurus 7: conversion of the taxonomy to alphabetical format

6 - Types of thesaurus

Summary

16 - Managing web-based information in an arts and humanities research environment

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12 - Community portals and the e-Confluence Zone: where bottom-up meets top-down

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Introductory preface

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17 - Portals and Web 2.0

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14 - MyUU: a case study of the Utrecht University portal

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Appendix 3 - Facets at stage 1 of analysis

13 - The thesaural relationships

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